Exploring Ruby on Rails

A discussion about the Rails framework, how to build with it and the benefits of Ruby.

View and Controller Section

LJ: So I understand that you can use this model-class to sling data around in
Ruby and have it magically written to the database. How do you go about
presenting it to the user and allowing them to interact with it?

DF: It's probably easiest to start with
the controller. Basically, Rails decides what object to send a method to
based on the URL. So when a request such as

http://guod.net/blog/postlist

comes in, it ends up calling something like this

BlogController.postlist

LJ: So, the URL is unpacked to decide which method to send and to which
controller class to send it to. Aren't there some security issues with that?
What if you end up calling some method you didn't intend to expose on your
controller object? It seems really unsafe.

DF: That's a good point. It can be unsafe if you're not aware of that,
if you add all kinds of functionality as public methods to your controller
class, you're exposing all of this functionality to the world.
Generally, you put code you don't want to expose to the public in private
methods.

LJ: Basically, Rails leverages Ruby's access control and introspection to
know what should be exposed to the Web interface. How does it know that? Do
you have to configure that?

DF: You can't call just any public
method on a controller object, the public methods inherited from the root Object class are filtered and
denied. But any public methods that are added to a controller class are
automatically available as actions. Instead of configuration you have
convention, and that convention is any public method you add to a
controller class is an action that can be accessed by a correctly formatted
URL. The fact that Rails even can do this is testament to Ruby's dynamism. You
can do crazy things like

DF: You guessed it. The generate script
also is used to generate your controller classes, web_services and so
on. Typically, you simply generate the class and then start editing from there.

LJ: I understand that URLs are mapped to a method call on a
controller object, but how does that finally end up spitting out HTML?

DF: The standard Rails HTML generating mechanism is the ERb template. ERb,
as you know, stands for embedded Ruby, and it is a simple way to embed small
pieces of Ruby code into HTML documents. So for each action in a controller,
you typically would have a corresponding "view" consisting of an ERb/HTML
template file (.rhtml) with the same name as the action.

LJ: And you have to set up some sort of data structure for the template to
access?

DF: Not really. The view has access to the instance-variables of the
controller. It's a lot like they are friend classes in that the instance-data
simply is available in the view templates, as if it were in the same scope.

LJ: Then, rendering the view effectively works like a method call on the
controller object--all of its internal state is available for the view to
access?

DF: Pretty much.

LJ: I have some notion now that each table in your database is going to
have a model and each page in your blog is going to have a controller and view
class associated with it. The arrangement looks, more or less, like Figure 2.
I'm wondering how many classes you ended up with, how many lines of code?

Figure 2. The Blog Arrangement

DF: Well, to get something working, it
probably was between 400 and 600 lines of my own code and a half dozen
controller-classes. But, that includes quite a
few things such as authentication and administrative pages. Obviously, that number
could be improved upon--I'm a Ruby newbie--but I'm happy with the
codebase size.

LJ: Have people been liking your blog?

DF: I think people have liked it; I mean my programmer friends read it.
It's nothing special, I'm not going to replace WordPress or blogger.com, but
my buddies get a kick out of reading it and posting comments, and my parents
are coming around slowly. I think people like it mainly because there are
pictures of my daughter up there all the time.

LJ: What about your programmer friends? What has their reception been to you
developing in Ruby on Rails?

DF: A lot of my friends have been really interested. Some of my friends who
are in grad school have started to embrace Ruby for some of their
projects. I
even have a friend who wrote an iCal library in Ruby and now is
planning on rewriting his own Web site using Rails.

LJ: But some big name developers out there seem to have had a fairly negative
response to all the Rails hype. Why do you think that is?

DF: I think fear of any technology is
not really based in reality, because
what is technology after all? It's just another way of solving a problem. But
I hear what you're saying, I've read some comments that I feel totally
were not based on the facts. I think that some of it is probably due to people who
really are invested in one framework or the other and maybe are afraid that
Rails' momentum could threaten their authority or their opportunities if it
were to take over a lot of market share in "web-app-framework-land". So
there's that, and then there's the whole thing of if this becomes "the way to
do it", then they'll have to start learning a whole new language and framework
all over again.

LJ: Did you have a tough a time learning Ruby as you were learning Rails?

DF: No, I didn't.

LJ: I remember when you and I were
doing a code walk-through the other day,
and you said you didn't even know how to assign a hash element. I thought it
was pretty amazing that you'd written an entire blog and didn't even know a
language fundamental such as that one. It says something about the ways Rails was
designed that you don't have to be a guru in the language to do a fairly
complex Web application with it.

DF: Yeah, that's one of the things Rails has to offer: Ruby. That's awesome.
People miss that point--the language is awesome. It's fun to write in. The Rails
framework itself is fun too, and it's very fast to develop in.

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Ruby reminds me on the forecast of gartner, that till 2010 there will be 40% less employment in information technology. The forecast bases on the fact, that productivity in IT increases dramatically. Ruby demonstrates another highly productive environment. It is not neccessary to learn anything, neither design pattern nor programming languages. For Doug Fales who is very experienced in Java, Ruby is a nice trip. But I would not begin with it.